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Did NASA Climatologist Just Say We Will Have Global Cooling?

Lisa Haven, writing for the right wing web site Before It’s News, predicts a wide range of disaster for 2015. She forecasts “the rise of a One World Religion, an economic collapse, policed streets, and more Biblical end times signs… riots, earthquakes and likely numerous deaths“. Yet, the headshot that goes along with her byline looks cheery, even perky. Lisa Haven seems to be happy about the disasters to come.

Among her predictions for 2015: “Another thing that we could see on the horizon for 2015 is that NASA climatologist John L. Casey believes another mini Ice Age could be headed our way despite Al Gore’s long held belief that the world is warming. It seems our brilliant scientists can’t seem make up their minds whether our earth is cooling or warming. Could it be that all of this nonsense is just a ploy in the great lie of the now dubbed ‘Climate Change?’”

Is this true? Has a NASA climatologist analyzed scientific data to predict that 2015 will be a year of global cooling?

In any honest examination of this claim, the first thing that becomes apparent is that John L. Casey is not employed by NASA. Casey can only claim to have once worked as a “consultant to NASA Headquarters performing space shuttle and space station analysis.”

The word “consultant” can apply to many things these days, including independent contractors who are hired to wash windows. So, we now need to ask ourselves what kind of consulting John L. Casey has the training to perform. The answer is that he has a masters degree in management. He has earned no degrees in science of any kind, much less climatology in particular.

The “analysis” that John L. Casey conducted as a consultant for NASA might well have been supply chain analysis, or human resources analysis, but climatological analysis for NASA is not likely a bullet point on his resume. The very fact that Casey describes himself as conducting analysis of space shuttle and space station activities suggests that he wasn’t really working directly on analyzing climate data. The bulk of the data that has led scientists to conclude that the Earth’s climate is warming has not come directly fromthe space station or any space shuttle.

John L. Casey is, however, one of the “experts” cited by U.S. Senator James Inhofe. This tells us something of the level of serious policy analysis we can expect from the incoming Republican majority in the Senate.

Newsmax has also run a couple of times, including today, an article by Tom Luongo, who bills himself as “a former scientist with the University of Florida” who “runs” the Resolute Wealth Letter program. Luongo strongly echoes John Casey. Have you looked into the background of Tom Luongo? For that matter, what do you make of Newsmax, which publishes vast amounts of right-wing material interlaced with questionable medical advice?

I agree that global warming and global cooling are two different ideas about what is happening to our planet. Anyway, perhaps we should think in terms of local warming or local cooling. Perhaps the areas influenced depend on their position relating the ocean / sea near them. There have been several climate changes in the past century, as described at http://www.1ocean-1climate.com. All of them have been influenced mainly by the same factor: what happened tot the oceans near them.

He’s a smart guy, but this isn’t his field. The trend here in the north east is hotter summers and colder winters. I say to the Chicken Littles, yeah you’re right. The average temperature has gone up. But there’s not a damned thing we can do about it. What, you think development is going to stop? Economies stop expanding? Populations stop growing? We and others are going to keep pumping out carbon because the alternative is unemployment and a wet blanket on the economy. That’s something that the tie-die shirt crowd doesn’t seem to understand. Our entire financial structure is based on the Doctrine Of Perpetual Growth. Simply defined, it’s keep growing or bust. Slow that growth by a couple points and the vast layers of Ponzi schemes will start unraveling. What kills the arguments of Global Warming believers is the inherent pessimism of their position. If we are causing global warming, and we must slow development, then by default our standard of living will drop. They’re saying we must become poorer to stop the sky from falling. And that’s just not going to play to the crowd. We’re going to get bigger and bigger until everything breaks. We really don’t even have a choice. We’re on a locomotive going downhill with out brakes and the only thing they can do to stay on the tracks is keep feeding the machine more and more fuel. The fuel is debt.

Dennis, your argument is as poorly-conceived as those that claim that human beings are the “most evolved” species on Earth.

You ask people to join in your assumption that there is only one way to develop, and that’s with dirty energy. Once that unspoken premise is accepted, your conclusion follows in a neat and tidy line, but it’s a ridiculous unspoken premise.

There can be many forms of economic development, just as there are many forms of biological evolution. Only those deeply invested in fossil fuels, emotionally or financially, don’t understand that.

I suppose anyone can go out and find some loony site on the web (Lisa Haven) who references some guy making looney predictions (John Casey). I never heard of him before, and now I know why. These people aren’t even on the fringe of the scientific discussion and debate, and nothing can be learned from them about those who have legitimate doubts that AGW will result in catastrophe.

What legitimate doubt are you talking about, Gary? Why don’t you point us to someone you think has legitimate doubts, and then we can take a look at what this person has to say.

In the meantime, these “legitimate doubts” remain merely theoretical, and we look at the fact that the loudest voices of resistance to confronting the problems caused by anthropogenic global warming come from loony people on the fringe, most of whom turn out to be industry shills.

Back in 2007, I made an effort to understand the basis for all of the predictions being made that AGW was going to result in catastrophe. I reviewed about 360 papers. They almost all exclusively predicted negative consequences. It seemed a curious to me. I thought there had to be some benefit to warmer temps. The funny part was, I would stumble over papers that predicted contrary negative results. Some were absurd. For example, the were many predictions of more intense and frequent El Niño. This was going to drive temps even higher. Another common prediction was to have greater and more intense Altlantic hurricanes (the new norm). However, el niños inhibits Altlantic hurricanes. And for the last ten years we have had largely an absence of both. The predictions coming out of 2005 have failed to come true. And the measure of total cyclonic activity ACE worldwide is historically low (Ryan Maue publishes this). Largely, the models that predicted these affects have been wrong. Similarly, global models as published in the IPCC provided estimates of future temps. It has now become obvious that they have consistently over estimated temps, and the divergence continues to increase as the current “pause” of 15-20 years continues.

When Michael Mann produced a historical reconstruction based on tree ring proxies that was prominent in Al Gore’s movie, it drew a lot of attention since it basically wiped out what was commonly known amongst historians, archeologists and earth scientists as the Roman and Medieval warm periods, as well as the Little Ice Age. This was a published paper, but there wasn’t enough info for others to properly examine and reproduce the results. What ensued was a several year effort by many people to understand what Mann did, for which he strongly fought. This included requests of various kinds, FOIs- and eventually lawsuits.

This is not the only case of climate scientists obfuscating the scientific process. Eventually, Steve McIntyre (a retired engineer) was able to determine what trees were used, the weighting and statistical methodology used. He then was able to show that the result Mann came up with was largely a statistical artifact, not an accurate representation of historical temps.

There is an abundance of scientific evidence that temps were both higher and lower than they are today. Plus, you can imagine the error involved in using tree rings, as their width depends on rainfall, soil conditions, other trees…to claim to know what the global temp was 1000 years ago to accuracy of less than one tenth of a degree makes me skeptical of the results.

True, there seem to have been fewer Atlantic hurricanes than warmists predicted, at least temporarily. But artic sea ice keeps disappearing and average surface temperatures keep rising, even if there was a short-term “pause.” Glaciers keep retreating, tundra keeps melting, and sea levels keep rising. Daily record high temperatures continue to outnumber record lows. Co2 continues to increase. Does this show we’re in a cooling period? And if we’re in a pause, why don’t glaciers keep the same volume, why isn’t sea level staying the same, etc.?

Tough to properly respond in a single post. The current warming period dates back to the mid-1800s. There is no doubt about it. Glaciers have retreated likewise. But there are several recent examples of retreating glaciers revealing the remains of towns and other artifacts confirming temps as high or greater than today. (For example, “Ice-borne prehistoric finds in the Swiss Alps reflect Holocene glacier fluctuations, Journal of Quaternary Science, 2007). Likewise, retreating ice has exposed trees and evidence of farming dating back to the Vikings.

The point being that there have been several warm periods that compare with today, And it is nearly impossible to isolate an anthropological contribution with so much natural variation.

Arctic sea ice has also retreated since the late 1970’s. Antarctic sea ice, on the other hand, has increased. Total global sea ice extent is actually 0.3 million sq km above the long term average (Univ. of Illinois). It is another one of those realities that don’t match the theory.

The radiative impact of the doubling of CO2 works out to be about 1+ degrees, which is not significant. The fear is that warmer temperatures results in higher humidity, amplifying the effect since H2O is the dominate greenhouse gas. The Antarctic, being very dry, was expected to see the greatest rate of temperature increase, having the most impact due to the increase in moisture. But it has actually cooled over the last few decades.

Gary, when people respond to your claims, showing them to be full of holes, you keep on going to other claims, repeated from fossil fuel industry talking points, rather than addressing the criticism. Can you point us to some scientific studies that substantiate these claims?

I would not claim we are in a cooling period. But even if temps remained the same, glaciers might still retreat for some years. A glacier is one big ice cube. Glaciers can also retreat independent of temps, since precipitation and humidity are also significant factors.

Sea level rise has been under way since the last ice age, and continues today. You can view historical data (PSMSL), and it shows the rate really hasn’t changed in the last 100 years. With or without any human contributions, the sea level will continue to rise, but it is hardly alarming.

Gary, you can IMAGINE the error in tree ring analysis, but can you substantiate it? We aren’t talking about imagination here. You know that in tree ring analysis for climate studies, it isn’t just one tree in one place that’s analyzed, right?

Ok. Poor word choice. My point was that tree growth is determined by moisture, soil conditions (nitrogen, pH), sunlight, competition with other plants- in addition to temperature. It very noisy. Plus, samples are bore holes. Tree ring width varies as you traverse around the circumference. Different bore holes in the same tree will provide variations in the ring widths. And tree ring growth changes with the age of the tree.

In the Mann paper it wasn’t a single tree, but it turned out to be driven by literally just a handful of trees in SW US.

Gary*, there are other ways to measure paleotemperature. One of the most useful and accurate is by measuring the relative ratio of oxygen isotopes. Whether collected from deep sea sediments or ice cores, the ratio of O18 to O16 is dependent on temperature at the time the Oxygen (incorporated in water or carbonate) was deposited. The correlation is very well known.

You keep coming back to the argument that in the past global temperatures were warmer and cooler than today. The fact that global temperatures do change naturally over time, indicating changes in global climate, is not being debated. However, this fact does not tell the entire story. The changes we are observing today are occurring at a much greater pace than at any time in the Earth’s history (with the exception of global catastrophic events such as asteroid impacts). The observed increases in global temperature we have seen in the past century (or even the past 50 years) normally occur on time scales of millennia. It’s not the magnitude of the changes that is so dangerous, it’s the rate at which the changes are happening. The changes cannot be accounted for by natural processes.

The most disturbing aspect of the current state of climate science was the release of thousands of emails of many of the worlds most prominent names in the field (Phil Jones, James Hansen, Micheal Mann).

This was what I saw within those emails:

1. They weren’t nearly as confident about their public pronouncements when discussing among themselves.
2. They perverted the peer review process by providing each other with info on papers they were reviewing, and by reviewing each other’s papers.
3. They conspired to remove an editor from a paper that published a paper that challenged the work they did. And apparently they were successful.

What I saw was a group of scientists that clearly were no longer being objective.

Gary, individual scientists are not objective. No human being is. That definitely includes the ones that are bei paid by fossil fuel corporations to create disinformation of the sort that you pass along. The methods of science move us toward objectivity by requiring replication and transparency among specialists in an entire field. Human beings may make snarky comments and engage in petty conspiracies. The system of science is different, and is open to challenge.

It is telling that, despite huge amounts of money from Big Oil for an entire generation, a coherent rival hypothesis to support the sort of claims you make has not emerged – just paper thin excuses that have been easily disproved.

I totally agree with you that we need to maintain the highest standards of scientific principles. Openness and being able to replicate is critical. But as I have said, ithe above referenced individuals have actively prevented this from happening. They won’t make public the code and basis for their results, despite that the work was paid for by taxes. This is wrong.

However, whatever Big Oil has spent is a small percentage of what the government spends. Government has basically taken over all of the funding research in climatology.

To All
The things that have changed over the years is that the thermometers used to take the temperature recorded for the record books were originally in a rural location and now they are in an urban location because of urban sprawl. As a kid growing up in the 50’s and 60’s I do not remember feeling as hot as I do now a days. The biggest reason for that is there was a lot of pollutants in the air back then, which blocked the suns heat therefore less evaporation of the water and less feeling of being hot. Now a days with less pollution in the air the suns rays heat the earth up more causing more evaporation of the water therefore more and bigger clouds and therefore more sever weather like we see nowadays. Kind of logical common sense approach to what is happening nowadays which a lot of people lack today because they were raised in the urban areas and not in the agricultural setting. Science is open for challenge nowadays but it has to be politically correct or it doesn’t get the proper publicity that is needs.

I don’t agree in general with your theory about reduced pollution, although some pollution (such as from volcanoes) temporarily lowers global temperatures, and asteroid impacts have/would have major cooling effect. Bigger “urban heat islands” have raised temperatures. That’s another “forcing” to take into account. Also, the increase in population and accompanying construction (houses, buildings, electrical systems, etc.) means storms equal to those in past years, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and thunderstorms, cause more damage now than they would have decades ago, even though some structures are more resistant to damage than in the old days. We have to be careful not to think storms are more severe just because storm-related disasters are increasing. The scientific studies J Clifford calls for — I agree with him on that — should take those factors into account. In other words, it’s not just a matter of greenhouse gases.

Okay – I don’t think that Gary is going to bother to look for real scientific studies on this. He’ll just try to change the subject again. So, I’ll offer this information to inform the discussion: Charles, scientists already HAVE taken the urban heat island effect into account in their climate research.

The Cold Earther (fossil fuel corporation) claim that climate change is really just an artifact of the urban heat island effect was soundly disproven by research conducted by the Berkley Earth Surface Temperature project, which brought together 15 separate sources of data to confirm that temperature rises have been seen in rural weather stations as well as urban ones.

I am sorry I am not as responsive as I you would like. I have had a family issue that has had me at the hospital everyday since Friday.

I have already offered several references. On what topic do you speak? And what with the snide remarks? I am not sure I have said anything to warrant such scorn. I have only tried to summarize the data and evidence I have seen over the last several years.

Gary, you are summarizing only certain aspects of the data. That’s the problem. You’re putting out old, disproven talking points – like the Urban Heat Island nonsense – to try to make it seem that anthropogenic climate change is in doubt. You’re making ad hominem attacks on scientific ideas, which is not the same thing at all as skepticism – it’s a fallacious tool of distraction. If you took the slightest effort to move beyond Big Oil’s materials, you’d find ample responses to the claims that you bring up. Why haven’t you done so?

We do agree that the areal extent of Antarctic sea ice has been increasing over the past decade or two. It has also been acknowledged that the total volume of Antarctic ice has also been increasing. However, in a recent analysis of Antarctic ice volume, the increase in ice volume in the Antarctic is an order of magnitude (10x) LESS than the loss in Arctic ice volume. Total polar sea ice volume is rapidly decreasing.

The authors (Paolo et al.) state: “When we sum up losses around Antarctica, we find that the change in volume of all the ice shelves was almost zero in the first decade of our record (1994-2003) but, on average, over 300 cubic kilometers per year were lost between 2003 and 2012.”

Gary, I’m afraid I’m the one who mentioned urban heat islands. J Clifford confirmed my comment about taking them into account by citing a study that says the urban heat islands have a very small impact on total global temperature. However, I think the fact that so many people live in urban areas makes the urban heat island effect more important in a practical sense. Even if the amount of heat from urbanization is small, because so many people are affected by it, discussions of global warming should mention it, in my opinion, if only to stress that it’s not that big an effect overall, and isn’t as much a priority for efforts to stop or reverse global warming as greenhouse gases, which inhabit all areas of the globe.

The tenor of this discussion reflects the intensity of the controversy over global warming, even if 97% or so of scientists agree that global warming is occurring and a somewhat smaller percentage agree that human activity accounts for a significant part of it. I personally think that everyone would benefit by keeping the discussion as civil as possible.

Mark: thanks for the references. It should be noted that the results from the AMS study are from a mathematical model (always be skeptical of models). Time will tell if the model is valid. But ice volume is something I haven’t spent much effort looking into. You have sparked my interest.

Charles: as you mentioned, the UHI obviously exists. The question is whether it can be accounted for when trying to take historical temp records is the question. I think it can be, with some error.

Also, I will try to contain my tenor. It seems the whole topic has become so politicized. The whole concept of surveys of scientists as proof seems political to me. But I am in the 97%- so I guess it could be a truism that has no real significance. The Important question is whether there will be a significant long term impact. Unfortunately, this is where things get much less certain. And before we inflict enormous hardship on people, I’d like to be a bit more certain.

Please provide a reference or two of the Big Oil talking points. I really am curious to know where they come from (I’m not being sarcastic here).

Even if some of what I say is in alignment with what these talking points are, to view what I say negatively because it is also associated with some group you view negatively is a logical fallacy (argumentum ad hominem – guilt be association).

It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection. These are the times when maps fade, old landmarks crumble and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.